This sounds like an interesting problem, and yet another
incompatibility or
complication thrown in by Microsoft. I am aware of their new
deduplication
feature (the press seems pretty unenthusiastic about it), but if
it requires
changes to backup programs, Bacula including the Bacula Enterprise
one
for sale will be totally ignorant of these changes, so please
don't spend your
money for nothing (though it is a very small price).
Can you explain to me why the size of the files are listed as 0
bytes? Any
reasonable underlying OS deduplication system should be totally
transparent
to application programs or service programs such as Bacula, so I
don't see
why the sizes would be zero. It sounds like Microsoft requires
the application
to do something special to have the files rehydrated -- if so, it
is one of their
worst farces since Vista.
So, an update for everyone.
This is definitely caused by deduplication. I have two Windows 2012 servers in a DFS cluster and deduplication was turned on on both of them.
Couple of days after I posted this, on one of the servers I turned off deduplication (since it really has enough disk and I don't actually need deduplication there).
After turning off deduplication nothing really happens initially on the server (the old files are still deduplicated) so I had to run a job to do that:
After couple of hours the system deduplicates all files.
I started Bacula again and the backup worked flawlessly. So my conclusion is that it definitely doesn't support deduplication in Windows 2012.
I read some articles about it and I would say that you definitely need to do something special with the files, besides VSS.
I presume that the current Bacula client on Windows does not do it -- and from some reading it appears that other backup solutions (commercial products) have similar issues.
At the moment I'm running backup from one DFS node which has the files deduplicated and everything works ok. The other node is not backed up.
Cheers,
Bojan
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